Valcartier

Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / July 1, 2025 / Local history, Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, Quebec City, Ruby Pratka, Sillery, Valcartier

Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Heritage preservation groups in Sillery and Valcartier are among the 15 organizations across the province that have received funding from the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) through the SHARE grant program, a Canadian Heritage-funded initiative to support projects “sharing the diverse history of English speakers in the province,” Sherbrooke-based QAHN announced last week.

SHARE program co-ordinator Julie Miller said she was “very pleased” about the diversity of the selected projects, which span the province from the Outaouais to the Gaspé, via the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships, the historically bilingual Pontiac region in Western Quebec, and Quebec City.

The Société d’histoire de Sillery (SHS) has received funding to contribute to the creation of a vast, bilingual archive of Quebec culinary history, from a multicultural, local perspective. “It’s an immense project to do an inventory of what exists in terms of culinary history, particularly anglophone and Indigenous culinary history – the Fédération Histoire Québec is doing a project on the scale of Quebec. We’re going to focus on the anglophone history of Sillery,” said SHS president Jean-Louis Vallée. The project will centre around inventorying, digitizing and translating recipes and stories about ingredients, traditions, communities and companies that have left their mark on local cuisine, writing articles which make those stories accessible to the general public, and indexing the content to make it easier to search. Vallée also said the SHS planned to conduct oral history interviews with older members of the anglophone community, to discuss culinary traditions and memories around food and cooking.

“Sillery has an interesting anglophone history that we haven’t made a lot of room for in the past 20 years,” Vallée said. “The population was 50-50 [francophone-anglophone] in the 19th century, and I don’t think we had a francophone mayor until the 1930s. There was a strong proportion of people of Irish ancestry, but every cultural community came here with its cooking methods and its recipes.”

Author Rose-Hélène Coulombe, a retired civil servant and self-described “memorialist” who has written three books on the culinary history of Quebec, is one of the project’s co-ordinators. She said the Sillery project will be the first step in expanding the wider project, dubbed Patrimoine ~ Identités, to the anglophone community. “We will have articles, recipes, updated recipes, talking about products and food that are key to identity,” she said. “We are working with students as well; I have a student who has done an article on the history of pouding chômeur, on how we used to use buttermilk, that sort of thing.” The ultimate goal, Coulombe and Vallée said, is to create a provincewide archive, using Sillery as a pilot project.

The Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier Historical Committee has received funding to finish a documentary about Valcartier Elementary School, to mark the school’s 75th anniversary. The project began shortly before the pandemic and was paused due to public health measures. “We finally finished the interviews last spring,” said historical committee president Debbie Chakour. “We have multigenerational families and seniors sharing their experiences. It was easy to find families where three generations went to the school. One of the seniors we spoke to was the daughter of a teacher; she was actually born in the school building and lived there as a baby!”

Chakour said the small school was deeply linked with the local English-speaking community and the growing bilingual community on the nearby military base. “Twenty- five years ago, there were about 50 kids; now there are closer to 120, and they almost sit on top of each other. They may need to build a new school in the next few years, which is another reason why we want to document it. Let’s celebrate the memories while we have them!”

Chakour hopes the film will be completed by the end of February, 2026. “The deadline is the end of March, but you can’t really do anything in March in Valcartier because there are too many Irish things going on,” she said.

Miller said there will be a third round of SHARE grant funding distributed to heritage projects in February 2026. Organizations must be members of QAHN to apply for funding. To learn more, contact her directly at julie@qahn.org.

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Ice Hotel returns to its origins for 25th edition

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / January 10, 2025 / Cassandra Kerwin, Ice Hotel, Quebec City, Valcartier

Ice Hotel returns to its origins for 25th edition

Cassandra Kerwin

cassandra@qctonline.com

Year after year, dedicated artisans, architects and engineers work together to create a winter paradise from snow and ice. Stepping across the Ice Hotel’s threshold, the expected 80,000 visitors will discover a world of wonder built around the theme of “Back to the Origins.” The hotel is open to tours, visitors and overnight guests until mid-March, weather permitting.

Construction began as soon as temperatures dropped be- low freezing over consecutive days, giving artists, arti- sans and construction crews about a month to complete the 53,000-square-foot Ice Hotel from 45,000 tons of snow and 3,000 ice blocks. Visitors have

been touring the hotel since Dec. 27, with the first overnight guests welcomed on Jan. 4. Over the following weeks, all 30 suites, including 20 themed rooms, will be completed, add- ing to the Grand Hall, the Ice Bar, the Chapel and the 60-seat restaurant, a collaboration with the Château Frontenac. All of this is to accommodate an expected 80,000 visitors and 3,000 overnight guests over the season.

“From what I know, from what I’ve seen, a 100 per cent natural ice hotel, I don’t know of any other ice hotel in the world that has this surface area,” said Hugues Painchaud, site manager of the hotel located at Village Vacances Val- cartier.

The four basic elements, wind, fire, water and earth, are sculpted into the walls of the Chapel to be united at the altar. Their human shapes stand tall in the entrance hall. Behind them, visitors discover powwow dancers and a traditional canoe made of ice, and a snow longhouse. At the Ice Bar, visitors can order cocktails and mocktails served in glasses made of ice.

“We have new ideas every year. The talent for sculpture, since I started the ice hotels 15 years ago, has really increased tenfold,” said artistic director Guy-Olivier Deveau. “We pay tribute to nature and the elements in our lobby, our grand hall and our bar. Then, we also have a section that pays tribute to the First Nations. We are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Hôtel de Glace and we are taking a look back at the history that brought us here.”

After admiring the sculpted snow walls, visitors tour the rooms, each with their respective themes: origami, mosaic, Quebec and outer space, to name a few. People cannot help but stare, smile and wonder.

As day turns to night, visitors leave and guests check into their rooms. Thanks to the soundproofing and insulation provided by snow, people sleep through some of the quietest nights in rooms with temperatures hovering around -5 degrees Celsius, regardless of the noise and temperature outside. The hotel provides its guests with thermal sleeping bags, a pillow and a foam mat- tress on plywood over an ice base. In larger rooms, wood- burning fireplaces offer added warmth and ambience. Some lucky guests even have access to hot tubs and saunas. Wash- rooms are located in a heated building adjacent to the hotel. For an additional fee, guests can also reserve a room in the adjacent hotel.

Besides the Ice Hotel, the Village Vacances Valcartier offers a range of other winter activities including ice skating, snow sliding and the tropical indoor water park, Bora Parc. For those coming from the city without a car, Unitour offers transportation for a fee from the Château Frontenac to Village Vacances Valcartier and back, according to a schedule found on toursvieuxquebec.com. For more information, visit valcartier.com/en.

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Male caregivers are welcome in the Shedquarters

Local Journalism Initiative / The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph / September 25, 2024 / Lévis, mental health, Quebec City, Ruby Pratka, Valcartier

Male caregivers are welcome in the Shedquarters

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

English-speaking men in the Quebec City region who are caregivers will soon have access to a new Wellness Centre program aimed at creating social connections and making the experience of being a caregiver less isolating.

The Shedquarters project is inspired by the pan-Canadian Men’s Shed movement, ex- plained project co-ordinator Elise Arsenault. Men’s sheds are autonomous community initiatives that provide a safe and friendly environment where men can work on meaningful projects at their own pace, in their own time, in the company of other men. Arsenault, a master’s student in social work at Université Laval, explained that women tend to be more at ease than men when it comes to discussing difficulties they face openly, whether with a professional or with a friend or family member. “We know there are male caregivers around who are not using existing support services. When men talk about what’s bothering them, they tend to do it shoulder to shoul- der, rather than face to face,” she explained.

Shedquarters intends to give participants the opportunity to do just that. Arsenault said she hoped participants would take ownership of the project, creating “a community of English-speaking male caregivers, by and for the participants.”

The project is open to English-speaking and bilingual men of all ages who are caregivers, the schedule is flexible and the definition of “caregiver” is not restrictive. “You could be caring for a spouse or family member, or helping out a friend or neighbour – it’s a very wide definition,” said Arsenault. Men from around the greater Quebec City, Valcartier and Lévis areas are welcome to join. Arsenault said the program has already had several expressions of interest, and activities were expected to begin later this fall.

If you would like more information about the Shedquarters program for English-speaking male caregivers, either for yourself or someone you know, contact Elise Arsenault directly by phone (418-928-8388) or email (elars18@ulaval.ca).

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